Digital BW, The Print

"John Moody" <moodymz3@y...> wrote:
>
> One thing I don't care for with these black-box tools...

Good point. And getting "disconnected" from imagemaking itself is a
risk with our technology. 

Some have allowed digital tools to devolve them, asserting that Zone
System is now irrelevant, forgetting that Zone System's most important
tool was the carefully trained eye that could with precision see and
quantify greys where others saw color. 

Similarly, thanks to marketeers like Macbeth, photographers who print
inkjet color have become nearly incapable of the visual skills that
fine wet darkroom printers relied upon for their final prints...they
ignore acquisition of basic skills, becoming dependent on ever-more
expensive measurement gizmos, which was exactly the practice of
misguided semi-professional darkroom printers twenty years ago, thanks
to gizmo marketing departments.

 

 "John Moody" <moodymz3@y...> wrote:
>
> One thing I don't care for with these black-box tools is that you get
> disconnected from the manipulations upon the image data.